Elon Musk presenting the Tesla Powerwall.
Tesla Motors make the move beyond cars and starts to produce batteries for homes and businesses.
The batteries built by Tesla, will store solar energy and will serve as back-up solutions to the consumers during blackouts.
These batteries can also offer the possibility to give up power grid or to bring clean energy to remote areas that are not connected to an electric grid.
Tesla plans to deliver the new battery units to installers in the US by the summer of this year.
After the announcement, Musk stated that the new battery units produced by Tesla have the ability to change the entire energy infrastructure of the world.
The new system produced by Tesla is called Powerwall and consists of the same rechargeable lithium-ion batteries which are used by Tesla to power its electric vehicles.
Musk said that Tesla will make a partnership with Solarcity to install the batteries, but they will work with many more companies to accomplish this task.
Renewable energy sources like wind and solar could benefit from a broader development all over the world once the storage capacity is improved.
Elon Musk started the presentation of the new Tesla battery by showing how we produce energy today by burning fossil fuels and by showing how the energy mix is represented on the electric grid in the US.
The solution proposed by Tesla is represented by two parts.
The first part is represented by the Sun which is a handy fusion reactor in the sky that works every day and produces huge amounts of power.
The first part of the solution raises a first problem represented by the fact that the Sun is not shining during the night, and to solve this problem we need to store the energy generated during the day in order to use this energy during the night.
The second part of the solution is represented by the batteries used today which are not very developed at this moment and they are also expensive, unreliable, and with low efficiency.
The solution proposed by Tesla represents the missing link and is called the Tesla Powerwall which is a 10 kWh battery that can be mounted on a wall inside or outside the house, it has
integrated safety systems, it works very well with solar energy and is able to cover all your energy demand.
If you are connected to a grid, once you have the battery you don’t have to worry about blackouts because you will always have power, it reduces the utility bills, if there is an ice storm you don’t have to worry about remaining out of power, if you want you can move completely off-grid, you take the battery and the solar panels with you and this is all you need.
This battery gives you safety, security and a completely affordable solution for a cost of only $3,500.
You can mount this battery in the garage or on an outside wall of your house, and if you need more power you can stack up to nine of them.
This is a good solution for homes and for some small commercial applications.
For something that scales for much larger levels, Tesla has the Powerpack, and this is designed to scale infinitely.
Entire buildings can be powered with these batteries and with the solar panels mounted on the roof of the buildings.
These batteries represent a great solution also for people which live in remote areas, in areas of the world where electricity is not available.
With the Powerpack we can do gigawatt class installations because the whole system is designed for infinite scalability.
We can power cities and even make the transition to the use of sustainable energy in the entire country.
The US needs 160 million Powerpacks to make the transition to 100% renewable energy.
To transition the entire world to renewable energy we need 900 million Powerpacks.
To transition all transport, all electricity generation and all heating to renewable energy we need about 2 billion Powerpacks.
Gigafactory 1 has been designed as a giant machine, as a product of Tesla, and they have started to build this factory in Nevada now.
They will need many Gigafactories in the future to produce a very large amount of Powerpacks, and Tesla hopes that other companies will build Gigafactory class factories of their own because the Tesla policy of open sourcing the patterns will continue for the Gigafactory, for the Powerpack and for other Tesla products.
Tesla wants to show us that the goal to make the transition to 100% renewable energy is possible today, we can reduce the production of CO2 to zero and we can save the environment for us and for the future generations.